How do thermometers work?
Moment of Um
American Public Media
4.4 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 16 August 2024
⏱️ 4 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A thermometer is a handy dandy little device that measures temperature. We use them for lots of things, from telling us when we have a fever to making sure our roast chicken is cooked to perfection. But how does a thermometer actually measure how hot or cold something is? We asked physics graduate student Nicolas Dronchi to help us find the answer.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From the brains behind brains on, this is the moment of um. |
| 0:03.2 | Moment of um, um, um, |
| 0:07.6 | moment of um comes to you from APM studios. |
| 0:10.8 | I'm Frankie and I'm a soup chef. |
| 0:14.0 | I make soup. |
| 0:15.0 | I make soup. |
| 0:18.0 | Sure I'll branch out to a stew or maybe a chowder if I'm feeling wild, but my specialty is soup. |
| 0:26.0 | And you know what most people don't realize? |
| 0:28.0 | The temperature of your soup is almost as important as the flavor. |
| 0:32.0 | Take a nice gusaspacho, for example. You want to serve that cold |
| 0:36.3 | so it's refreshing on a hot summer day. On the other hand, a comforting bowl of chicken |
| 0:41.1 | noodle has to be nice and warm, but not so hot that it burns |
| 0:44.9 | your tongue. |
| 0:45.9 | It's a delicate balance. |
| 0:47.9 | So when I'm making a batch of soup, I always use my trusty thermometer, not a digital thermometer. I like the kind that is like a |
| 0:55.1 | glass stick with some red liquid inside. Classic, like chicken noodle soup. Yesterday I was testing |
| 1:02.3 | the temp on a nice big pot of potato leak soup when I realized, |
| 1:07.0 | jeez, I don't know how thermometers actually measured temperature. |
| 1:11.0 | My pal Reese was curious too. How do thermometers work? |
| 1:15.0 | Thermometers are how we measure the heat energy of an object or its temperature. |
| 1:20.0 | My name is Nicholas Tranchi and I study experimental nuclear physics. A classic |
| 1:26.2 | thermometer is a sealed glass tube that is filled with a liquid. As you heat it up, the |
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